• As Americans know, Canada's health care system, funded largely by taxes, is dramatically less expensive than America's -- well, unless you're a dog. The Canadian news service CTV reported in February that increasingly, pet owners in Winnipeg, Manitoba, are making the 120-mile car trip to Grand Forks, N.D., because U.S. veterinarian prices are significantly lower than comparable services by Canadian vets. One Winnipeg family, facing a $650 teeth-cleaning plus blood work for Jackson, their Shitzu, took him on the road trip to Grand Forks, where the bill came to $205. [CTV News, 2-13-2014]

• The Internal Revenue Service might have second thoughts about suing William Berroyer to recover a $60,000 tax underpayment since, by the time Berroyer was finished with them, the federal government had been ordered to write Berroyer (now age 66) checks totaling nearly 15 times that much. Berroyer, who was on his way out of the IRS office in Hauppauge, N.Y., after his first meeting in 2008, tripped over a phone cord and fell against a filing cabinet, injuring himself so severely that he required a 17-day hospital stay and rehabilitation and alleged long-term confinement to a wheelchair. [New York Post, 1-20-2014]

• In February, after a 43-year-old rape victim in Cowlitz County, Wash., missed court hearings, prosecutors, needing her testimony, filed for a rare "material witness" warrant to assure her availability -- by asking the judge to jail her. She acknowledged her anxieties, but promised to do better if the judge would dismiss the warrant. She pointed out that prosecutors were seeking to lock her up against her will -- to force her to testify that a rapist had once locked her up against her will (in addition to committing other indignities). (The sympathetic judge dismissed the warrant, but the woman has since missed another court date.) [The Daily News (Longview, Wash.), 2-21-2014]